“Spoilsport.”
“Steam fog. The condensation of moisture around specks of dust. Or maybe it’s radiation, when the air cools below a certain point, and heat radiates from the ground. The cold air falls and the warm air rises and fog forms where they meet.”
“You makin’ this up as you go?” said George.
“I read a book. About advection and cirrostratus and fractostratus and how weather forms in the upper air.”
“You understand it?”
“Not all of it. But I like the sound of the words.”
“They’re good words,” Allen said.
“I like weather. Clouds and wind currents and all that.”
George said, “You and Dean Frawley ought to get together.”
“We did—that time he called us in, remember, when we were raisin’ hell in the hall? I don’t know what he said to us—”
“He dressed us down a little.”
“—because I was looking at all those instruments on his walls.”
“All those thermometers and things,” Allen said. “What does he do with all those?”
“Looks at them, I guess. I wish he’d call us in again.”
“I think we could arrange it,” George said.
“Oh, hey,” said Toby, reaching into a pocket, “I brought us something.” He pulled out a thin brown bottle.
“Vanilla!” said George.
“In a rat’s reticule. Get a whiff of this.”
“Wowzie! Old booze in a new bottle. Where’d you get it?”
“Out of my dad’s quart jug. Siphoned it out with a soda straw, quarter inch by quarter inch. Been workin’ on it for a month. Here, Teach—ladies first.”
“Not here!” she said.
“Why not?”
“We can’t get drunk on the church steps.”
“We can’t get drunk on eight ounces either.”
“I don’t care, I don’t want to drink it here.”
“Consider it the sacrament,” said George, “and hurry up.”
“I don’t care what you call it, I won’t drink stolen hootch on the Presbyterian steps.”
“Baptist maybe?”
“We’ll drink it in the park.”
So off they went across the town, steering their way by trees and lampposts along the shrouded corridors. The fog was capricious. It shifted and melted and reappeared dead ahead, swallowing them whole, disgorging them then into the full glare of the moon. Prankish, a conspirator come to play in the night when all sane folk were abed.
Single file and holding on to the concrete rail, they made their way across the bridge. The fog boiled up from the ravine, enveloping street and bridge and gateway. A short way into the park they came out in the clear again at the top of a long hill that sloped down to the creek. The upper part lay in full light, the wet grass glistening. Below, the ravine was filled like a bowl with the dense white mist. It rose halfway up the slope.
They rested a moment on a bench. Then “Dive in!” said Allen, and disappeared into the whiteness. It was over her head. She could see nothing until, near the foot of the slope, the dim shapes of trees emerged, sycamores and willows, and the low tangle of underbrush along the edge of the stream. She could hear the boys coming down behind her. A few feet apart and they were lost.
“Where’d you go?”
“Here.”
“Where?”
“Over here!”
They swam in it, ran up again into the clear, drank from the bottle, and plunged again into the white sea. They played tag, skidding on the slippery grass, tripping over one another, and rising to touch and dart away. Then abruptly the fog would tear, drift away in patches. And they climbed the hill to wait till it gathered again.
The moon hung directly over their heads. “In all my life,” said Allen, tipping her head back, “I never saw the moon so bright.”
“Neither did I,” said George.
“If I climbed that tree, I could reach it.”
“Leave it where it is,” he said and he began to sing. “‘Ah, moon of my delight who knows no wane…’”
Allen joined in and they sang their way through the tentmaker’s garden, where the moon sought for one in vain.
“Perty,” said Toby. “You make up the tune yourself?”
“Yep,” George said.
“Nice.” Toby leaned back on the bench. “Did you ever stop to think,” he said, in that lavish improbable light, “that night is the true condition?”
“I can go for days without giving it a thought,” George said. “What do you mean, the true condition?”
“The real one. Factual. Permanent. Light may be a fact, but it’s not eternal. It comes and goes.”
“The sun goeth down, but it cometh up again in the morning, by gum.”
“Yes, and it by gum goeth down again that night. And there’s the dark again, waiting to swallow us. Light is a temporary thing, a spot on the dark. And darkness is always there. That’s what I mean, it’s the true condition.”
“But wait,” said Allen, “you’re saying permanence is the essential quality of truth. But doesn’t truth change sometimes, in the light of circumstance?”
“No. Circumstance may show it in a different light. But that doesn’t mean it’s changed. That just means we didn’t see it very plain in the first place. Truth is truth. It just is. It’s there, whether we see it or not. Like the dark.”
“Well, so is the sun,” said George. “It’s always there too, someplace, whether we see it or not.”
“But it won’t always be. It’ll burn itself out one of these times.”
“Don’t wait up. Anyway, ours isn’t the only sun. When this one goes, there’ll still be others.”
“They’ll burn out too, no matter how many. Lights go out,” he said darkly. “Darkness abides.”
“You’re a hard man, Tobe. You’d have made a good preacher.”
“God forbid!”
“I think He did,” said George. “Pass the jug.”
They drained the last drops. Drawing his arm back, Toby flung the bottle far down the slope and dashed after it into the fog that filled the ravine again.
Allen ran after him, George close behind. “Tag!” she said, running into Toby.
“No fair, I was looking for the jug.”
“Wait’ll it clears again.” She darted away. There was the sound of their running, the swish of their feet across the wet grass. But she could see nothing except the white drifts.
“Where are you?” George called.
“Here!”
He was somewhere above and behind her. Changing directions, she ran downhill toward the stream where the fog was thickest.
“Give a clue!” he shouted. He was closer, coming down the slope behind her.
She was among the trees before she could see them. The pale sycamores materialized in the dimness directly in her path. She swerved, missing a tree, turned, stumbled over a root, and fell smack into Toby.
“Oh!” she gasped, pitching against him. And before she could right herself, he pulled her closer and kissed her, quick and deliberate. She drew back with a little low laugh, then kissed him back and turned and ran, feeling her way until she was clear of the trees.
“Hellooooo!” from uphill. “Anybody there?”
“Here!” she called and darted off at an angle.
“Where?”
“Here.”
They collided somewhere in the middle.
She rose from the slick grass, out of breath, laughing.
“Is that you?” he said.
“It’s me. Is that you?”
“I think so. Let’s get out of this muck and find out.”
They trudged uphill into the clear. “Look at you!” she said. “You look like a dandelion. You’re all frizzy—your head’s gone to seed.”
“So’s yours. You look like the end of a mop.”
“Anyway, I’m not wet to the skin.” She flapped her sweater a couple of times. “My shirt�
��s still pretty dry.”
George flapped his shirttails and swung his arms back and forth. “Where’s Tobe? King’s X,” he sang out. “All outs in free.”
Toby emerged from the fog like a man walking out of water.
“What happened?” George said. “You fall in the creek?”
“I drowned.”
“You look like a fish,” Allen said, “all shiny.”
He laughed, a small exultant laugh, and stretched his arms to the sky. “O glabrous noon!”
“That’s glaucous,” said George.
“Glabrous if I ever saw one. Bald as an eagle.”
They shook themselves like wet puppies, keeping warm. Suddenly then they were hungry.
“Hamburgers!” said lean George. “Big, messy, ketchupy hamburgers on a greasy bun. Maybe the Grease Pit’s still open. I’ll race you to the bridge!”
They reeled through the quiet town, dizzy with laughter, a little crazy from the moonlight and a few mouthfuls of whiskey.
Eleven
She was late to school next morning. As she ran up the steps, the buzzer was sounding and the hall was full of kids scurrying to their first-hour classes. Toby came up the hall laughing with a black-haired girl, and they passed with only a nod. She felt suddenly pulled back into last night’s fog. He had deliberately pulled her close and kissed her, and she had kissed him back. Was he parading this girl before her classroom to show her last night’s encounter meant nothing? Did she want it to mean something? And how ridiculous she must have looked with her hair all frazzled and her clothes wet and frumpy. But already her classroom was full and she had to dispel the fog and get back to the task at hand.
It was a particularly busy day, and at 4:15, after the last afternoon class, there was a faculty meeting. Something to do with the debate festival scheduled for the following week. The meeting went on forever. She tried to listen, though everyone wanted to talk at once, and Pickering, who wasn’t even in charge, kept trying to force Dean Frawley into Robert’s Rules of Order. The dean was paying him no attention. They chattered away about the visiting teams and how to schedule them and get them fed at lunch and who would be the judges.
“We’ll draw on the history department,” the dean said, “and economics and English. That seems a good balance. Dr. Ansel will chair, of course.”
Of all the varieties of human expression, academic debate, usually about economic or political issues, seemed to her the dullest. Debate was so terribly earnest. She hid a yawn behind her hand and ignored ol’ Lordy, who was easily as bored as she was and trying to relieve the monotony by flirting with her. She wished he would wink just once at Mae Dell. Do her a world of good.
Her mind wandered back to last night’s escapade. She had scarcely been able to think about it since the morning. Like a dream it had evanesced through the day, growing dimmer, harder to recall in detail. Except for that one moment when she had stumbled … well, it was only a lark, a midsummer-night’s romp on a bright spring night, perhaps no more real than Titania and Bottom. And split three ways, there wasn’t enough whiskey in that little bottle to get a bumblebee drunk.
“And now let’s see—Mr. Gunther and Mr. Pickering, and we need a third. Would you be willing to serve, Miss Liles?” The dean was waiting for an answer.
“Oh—yes,” she said, realizing too late that she had just agreed to help judge the debates. How tiresome. Now she would have to bone up on the League of Nations.
“Mr. Chairman?”
“Yes, Mr. Pickering.”
“I assume Dr. Ansel will prepare grading sheets for the judges?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought about that,” said the dean.
“I wondered if you had.”
“These are only high-school teams, you remember. What do you think, Dr. Ansel? It’s only a matter of who has the best argument and the best delivery. We can pretty well judge by listening, can’t we?”
“Mr. Chairman?”
The dean sat down wearily. “You have the floor, Mr. Pickering.”
Pick stood up and delivered himself of the virtues of tallied points, much interrupted by Ansel and the others, regardless of parliamentary law. Allen’s thoughts wandered again to last night. It was odd that all day no one had mentioned the fog. It was a most extraordinary fog. Surely others had thought it so.
“Do I hear a second?”
A chorus of seconds was drowned out by the scraping of chairs and the meeting noisily adjourned. She went off down the hall with the Ladies.
“My land, it’s after five,” said Verna. “You girls want to go eat right now?”
“I’d just as soon,” said Gladys.
Mae Dell said she ought to go home first and freshen up.
“Aw, you look all right,” Verna said, going through the lounge door. “You don’t need to go home. You coming with us, Allen?”
“Might as well. I don’t have a thing in the icebox but Cokes.” There was some beer, which she kept for weekend nights with “her boys,” but she didn’t say that.
“I look a fright,” said Mae Dell, fussing at the mirror. “Gladys, do something with my hair.”
“What do you want me to do with it, sweep it under the rug?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Curl it up in the back a little.”
“Hand me your comb.”
Waiting for them, Allen stood at the window, idly looking out at the street. “That was quite a fog, wasn’t it?” she said.
“When?” said Gladys.
“Last night.”
“Oh, yeah, I read something in the paper about that.”
“Heaviest fog I ever saw.”
“That’s what they said.”
“Who said?” said Verna, coming out of the John. “What are you talking about?”
“The fog last night.”
“I noticed that, when I got up to shut my window. I went to bed with the window up, but there was a draft so I got up and shut it. It was chilly last night.”
“Pretty, though,” said Allen. “The moon was so bright and the fog so thick and white below it. It was low to the ground but sometimes it was over your head.”
“Were you out in it?” said Mae Dell.
“I mean, it looked like it was over your head. You could see it from the window.”
“That’s where I saw it,” said Verna.
“I saw the moon,” Mae Dell said. “I don’t remember any fog.”
“Your mind must have been in a fog,” said Gladys.
She was home before seven and by eight had graded a stack of papers. Recalling then that next week she would have to help judge the debates, she gathered up the books checked out last week, those dealing with World War I and subsequent history, and carried them in to the kitchen table. Consulting an index, she turned to a passage concerning the League of Nations and settled down to read. She was busily making notes when there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Toby appeared, grinning under a headdress of tattered turkey feathers; beside him, Frankenstein’s monster in rumpled corduroys and a bright green sweater. “Boo!” said George.
They pranced in, pleased as punch with themselves, and flopped down at the kitchen table. They had just come from chorus and orchestra practice, rehearsing for the spring concert.
“Got a beer, Teach? We’re dry as Kansas.”
George had to take off his mask to drink, but Toby kept the headdress on, the last remnant of his Indian suit resurrected from a toy box in his stepfather’s garage. “You should have seen us tonight!” he said.
“We were great,” said George. “Poor ol’ Miss Maxie! We sneaked in when her back was turned—”
“And when she turned around, George was sitting there at the piano with that green face.”
“Miss Maxie let out a yelp, and then she turned around the other way and Tobe had put on his feathers—” They broke up in laughter. “You’d a-loved it! Wish you’d been there.”
“Glad I wasn’t,” Allen said, laughing. “Did she give you h
ell? She should have.”
“Nah, she kept her dignity and just waited. We took pity on her and took the stuff off.”
“Sweet kids, aren’t you?”
She had found some potato chips in the cupboard and they finished those off, along with nibbles of cheese and sweet pickles. Nothing was said about last night. She might indeed have dreamed it—though sitting across the table from Toby, she couldn’t help feeling just a little self-conscious. Unobtrusively under the chatter, she picked up the rubber mask and slipped it on.
“You’ve aged,” said George and went on talking.
Safely hidden behind the Frankenstein face, she felt more secure. “Listen,” she said, interrupting, “you know that debate they’re having next week? I’ve got to be one of the judges. They seem to be cramming every extra activity into the last month of school. Tell me everything you know about the League of Nations.”
“It flopped,” said George. “What else do you want to know?”
“I want to know why. What are those kids likely to say about why?”
“Well, for one thing,” said Toby, “they’re going to come down hard on the Treaty of Versailles.”
“June 1919, Hall of Mirrors.” She referred to the open book. “Tell me about it.”
“Well,” he began, and taking off his feathers, he told what he remembered from his history class. George put in a word here and there. And she made notes and asked questions till she figured she knew all she had to. They seemed to enjoy having their roles switched, teaching the teacher.
“Hey, was that ten o’clock?” Toby said. “I got to get home. How many bells was that?”
“Four bits,” said George. “It’s only nine-thirty.”
“Anyway, I got to go. Murdstone’s decree.”
“Guess I’d better go too. Got to practice. Thanks for the beer, Teach.”
“Thanks for your help,” she said. “Don’t forget your feathers. And here’s your face, George.”
“Keep it in case of ghoulies.”
“The only ghoulies around here are the two of you. Here, take it. ’Night, you-all.”
“’Night. Thanks.”
She stood for a moment taking in the fresh night air. She felt relieved; everything seemed back to normal. Turning back to the kitchen, she cleaned up the table and set the glasses in the sink. Funny, she thought, as she sprinkled soap powder and turned on the water, that none of them had mentioned last night. But they were busy with their high jinks at rehearsal, that and the League of Nations. Anyway, last night was last night, and maybe she had made it all up in her head.
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